Living our own lives

If the path before you isn’t clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. – Joseph Campbell

I was always a "good girl".  At least in my mind.  I tried to be a good girl with my parents, in school....with the world.  I needed permission/direction from other people for what to do.  I didn't trust my heart or my needs...I looked for validation and was afraid of making mistakes, or offending someone, or seeming selfish. I even believed that if I followed the rules/laws/people in charge that I was strong in doing what was best because I believed laws were good. You know what happened?  I made mistakes...because that is what being human is. Not everything that we are taught are good laws or good for us.  I offended ME. I wasn't selfish...to the extreme --- I wasn't a whole person. I was not living my life in tune with my own heart and soul.  If I had listened to my own self, I would have been more valuable to family, community and to myself. I would have been truer to who I really am.  Trying to be a "good girl" kept me from living authentically.  I have been a child who has been blown by winds outside of myself thinking I was being strong but I was also being weak in character because I looked outside of myself for who/how to be. 

I am trying, at this old age, to BE ME.  So that I can feel more joyful and spread that joy and faith into the world.  And now encouraging others and my children to give themselves permission to be themselves and make their own mistakes and judgments.

This means I am taking my hyper focus off what/who was making me a victim in my own life...my marriage and my husband....and putting my focus more on WHO I AM and who I want to be. Lately I have been letting my H just be who he is (and letting myself not like him as he is - as I am becoming sadly more aware.)  I am working on showing up as me and not trying to change him.  That, for me, means talking and directing less right now as I just reflect and accept.  I am seeming more quiet and meek these days but inside I am finding better footage and saying fewer things "off the cuff" in emotion.  I am talking to H less and talking to my children more (as an adult).

I am ashamed of how I kept doing things I really didn't want to do throughout my younger life --- but I thought I HAD to.  But as I reflect, I realize I was taught and conditioned to do what others told me to do long ago from by parents, culture, feminine expectations.  And then I was resentful because I was doing things I really didn't want to do. 

Hopefully I will learn how to stop "playing small" and listen to the words... "to thine own self be true". Thanks for sharing my journey of arrested development.  Hopefully, I will be a "real girl" eventually.